Last week, the writers tipped their hand regarding the show’s endgame, which is on March 31. Unless there’s another twist, it looks like — spoiler alert — the mother has some kind of terminal illness. In the future, she is dying or dead, and the reason Ted is telling his kids how he met their mother is to honor her memory. Signal the online grumbling, but I think this would be a lovely turn. It would cast a kind of retroactive poignancy over the entire series, in one fell swoop. I’m a fan of retroactive poignancy. (Pictured, from left: Josh Radnor as Ted, Billy Zabka as himself, Neil Patrick Harris as Barney.)

Too bad about this one, because Josh Holloway has some unusual star power. The show isn’t awful so much as stubbornly ordinary, just another one of the formulaic procedural mystery series that CBS produces with such seeming ease. Holloway’s heroic Gabriel has a microchip in his brain that’s connected to the information grid, which makes him one of the biggest data miners ever. But the show veers away from ethics and controversy.